An Optimal Vertical Handover Strategy for Vehicular Network based on IEEE 802.21 MIH standards

Media Independent Handover (MIH) is a standard proposed by IEEE 802.21 working group to facilitate vertical handover support between heterogeneous wireless networks. Currently, the implementation of the IEEE 802.21 standard supported in ns2, provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) considers only the signal strength as a parameter to determine the destination network. Selecting a destination network using only RSS as indicator does not meet the needs of all users. For more accurate choice of destination network, vertical handover decision should consider the values of different criteria of network as well as the mobility of the node. In this paper, we have proposed an improved handover decision module including additional parameters which considers the mobility of the node and network conditions during handover decision in order to improve the performance of the network. The simulation results shows that the proposed method achieves better performance in terms of throughput, handover latency and packet drop ratio over the basic handoff scheme. More over the proposed method helps to reduce the unnecessary handoffs by eliminating the ping-pong effect and thus increases overall system performance. KeywordsHeterogeneous wireless Network, Vertical Handover, Media Independent Handover, Handover Decision, Handover Latency